The US Supreme Court has ruled that the Fourth Amendment protects smartphone location history. In a 6–3 decision in Chatrie v. United States, the Court decided that when police obtain historical location records from companies like Google or Apple, they conduct a search under the Constitution and must respect privacy rights.
The case is about a 2019 bank robbery in Virginia, in which police used a “geofence warrant” to obtain data from all devices near the scene during a specific time period. Using Google’s Location History, police narrowed the pool of devices and identified the suspect.
Lower courts upheld law enforcement’s right to use this method, arguing that if a user agreed to provide their location data to a technology company, they abandoned any reasonable expectation of privacy. But the Supreme Court ruled that accessing this kind of data violates a person’s reasonable expectation of privacy, even if a tech company stores those location records. Now, a person does not lose constitutional protection just because their phone constantly sends data to a private company.
The Supreme Court stressed that location history can reveal intimate details of a person’s life, from home and workplace information to religious, medical, and political activity.
Now, geofence warrants are treated under the law like conventional law-enforcement searches. That means they must follow Fourth Amendment rules: Police need a specific and legally justifiable reason to search someone’s private property or data. Courts will ostensibly check whether each geofence request is narrow and justified, and tech companies can more easily push back against broad data requests.
